I made these movies of my books using some cool Mac programs (GarageBand and iMovie). I am still amazed at how easy it was to put these "Picture Pages-style slide shows together and post them on facebook and YouTube. To create each movie, I started by dragging the background music into GarageBand, and playing with the songs a little. I often had to fade in and out and even remove sections of songs that were too loud. Then, I recorded myself reading the story that I wrote, pausing quietly between sentences for a few seconds. Next, I simply split my recorded voice (which looks like a sound wave, and is editable) into separate segments for each sentence and dragged the segments around so they matched up better with the music. When I was done with the audio, I exported it directly into iTunes.

The Next step was even more fun. I dragged the audio soundtrack into iMovie, and dragged my art in one by one. With iMovie, I was able to use various cropping effects (the Ken Burns Effect) and transitions, as well as control the time an image is displayed, and even edit sound and video quality.

The music for the Mary Had a Little Lamb movie is available on Amazon. The album is called Song of the Tribal Spirit and the artist is listed as Afrika. I loved listening to this album as I worked on the art for the books, and I am very happy to be able to share this movie, because I feel that it brings the book to life.  Here is the text for my Mary Story.

This is the movie that I made from my book, "Humpty Dumpty". The story takes place at the Great Wall of China, which I thought would be a much more interesting setting than a castle with Kings and Knights. The music is from iTunes. The first song in the movie is called "The Fisherman's Song At Dusk," which comes from the album "Chinese Traditional Music" by Hong Ting. The second song I used is titled "Splendor Night Vision," and it comes from the album "Splendid Jubilant New Year - The Collection of Chinese Festival Music," by Xiao-Peng Jiang & The Chinese Orchestra of Shanghai Conservatory. I wanted traditional Chinese music for the soundtrack, rather than new age music with an Asian feel.  Here is the text for my Humpty Dumpty Story.

The music for my "Hey Diddle Diddle movie" came from one of my favorite big band artists, Artie Shaw.  He has inspired a lot of my work over the years.  The songs I used in this movie are, "Moonglow", "Don't Take Your Love From Me" and "Deep Purple for the credits." Originally I was looking for only authentic New Orleans jazz, but everything that I found was just too lively.  I needed music with a softer more relaxing feel. Here is the text for my Hey Diddle Diddle Story.